Mike beamed at her, then leaned over, kissed her hand, and led her back onto the dance floor.
Chapter 25
Another Storm Rolls In
Rhiannon... Today…
A few days later, Rhiannon was curled up in the lounge room reading a book – but the peace was interrupted when the front door slammed shut, making her jump, and her father barrelled inside, not even noticing her presence.
“Dad, what’s wrong?” she asked, alarmed by his pale face and distracted gaze as he staggered down the hall towards her.
“Oh, hi darling.” He looked surprised that she was there. “It’s nothing, don’t worry,” he stammered. “I’m fine.”
“But you’re shaking! Come on, I’ll make you a cup of tea, okay?” she insisted, guiding him through to the kitchen.
As she busied herself putting the kettle on, lifting down mugs, standing on tiptoe to reach up to the top cupboard for their biggest teapot, and searching for the calming herbal mix Rose had brought them, she cast sideways glances at her dad. “What’s happened?” she finally asked.
“I’m okay, it’s all just a bit… strange,” he sighed.
“Yes, but what happened?” she demanded, trying hard to remain patient, but struggling.
“It’s Rose, I was –”
Rhiannon’s face fell. “Is she okay?” she whispered, heart in throat. “Can we do anything to help her?”
After long moments, her dad’s eyes finally focused on her, and she watched him take a deep breath, straighten his shoulders, and force himself to calm down.
“Sorry love, Rose is fine. Don’t worry.”
Relieved, for the moment at least, she took a breath herself, then got back to spooning out the tea leaves. From experience she knew that her dad would eventually confide in her, but he wouldn’t make a decision quickly, and in his current distracted state, she knew she might be waiting a while.
“I’m not sure how much you know about Rose’s daughter?” her dad asked reluctantly.
Rhiannon shrugged. “Nothing really. I only found out that she’d had a child at all when you told me at Mum’s memorial service. Lily? Daisy? Violet?”
“Violet.” It was a tortured whisper.
“Right, Violet. But she left home a long time ago, I think it was something to do with her father, when he died?”
Suddenly she realised that she didn’t actually know what had happened to Rose and her daughter, or her husband for that matter. The priest had interrupted her dad’s revelation that day, and she’d been too distracted at the time to care about anyone else.
But surely she could have asked since then. God, Rose knew everything about her life, had comforted her at her mum’s funeral, reassured her when she was scared she was turning into some kind of weather-controlling witch, yet she’d never paid any attention to her life. How selfish was that?
“I feel terrible that I didn’t know, that I didn’t ask. But Violet was your school friend, right?”
“Um, it was a bit more than that…” he said, then trailed off, reluctant again. When the kettle started whistling, he looked relieved for the respite. Rhiannon jumped up to make the tea, while Mike just sat and stared into space. But when she set the two mugs down on the bench and hauled herself up onto one of the stools next to her dad, she glared at him, wanting answers now. Shrugging helplessly, he picked up his cup, but his hand was shaking, and he had to put it down.
“Violet was my best friend growing up – we did everything together, spent all our time with each other, climbing the tor, making up stories, building forts, playing sport, watching the sun set and the moon rise. As we got older we started going to Rose’s ritual circles together... and we were dating from the time we started high school.”
Rhiannon’s eyebrows rose in shock.
“Well, not just dating, that’s playing it down far too much. We were in love. Totally inseparable. We had our whole life planned out. We were going to get married as soon as we graduated, and live together in the cottage at the bottom of the tor, the one that burned down. I was going to work with Dad, and Violet was going to study to be a social worker. We’d even talked about how many kids we would have, and when. It was all ahead of us.” His voice trailed off, and his eyes were glazed, as though he was a thousand miles away.
What the hell? At a total loss about what to say, Rhiannon lifted her mug and took a huge gulp of tea. It burned her throat, but she hardly noticed. All of a sudden she felt as though she was sitting next to a complete stranger. How had she not known any of this?
Had she just not been listening? Surely she would have remembered if her dad had wanted to be with someone else. If her mum had been his second choice. It was a small town. Someone must have known. Time seemed to fold in on itself, as she made an effort to grasp this strange new reality.
Casting her mind back, she tried to recall any hint that her father had loved someone else, but she couldn’t think of any strange moments or awkward interactions. Her parents had been totally devoted to each other, totally in love, and she’d always believed they were childhood sweethearts – yet clearly that wasn’t the case. What had she based her assumption on?
They had seemed to be totally in love with each other and their family of four, and totally content, whether they were staying in a caravan in a rainy seaside village or driving around Brittany in France in a tiny car, or just hanging out at home, drinking tea and talking, or making dinner together, with no need for anything to distract them from each other.
And her parents had definitely adored each other. There was no acting on earth that could have faked that. They went on regular date nights – off to the movies, or out dancing, or to a restaurant for a romantic dinner. They’d also loved just being at home together – cooking, helping her and Brodie with their homework, perching on stools at the kitchen bench where she sat now to chat about their days. They supported each other through the highs and lows of life, encouraged one another to follow their hearts and their dreams and be all they could be, and were each other’s best friend.
And when her mum had become sick, Mike had been the doting husband, taking time off to look after her, being totally devoted to his wife, to the exclusion of all else – even her and Brodie at times. There was no way any of that had been an act, no way the last twenty years of his life had been pretend.
But now that she thought about it, she realised that her dad never talked about his younger self. And how strange that she’d had no idea that he’d been in love with Rose’s daughter. Not been aware that in another life, another universe, Rose had almost been Mike’s mother-in-law. Could have been her real grandma.
Was fate real? Were there some events that would happen no matter what, some sort of Sliding Doors thing where regardless of your decisions, your actions, you ended up in the same place? Because Rose kind of had been Mike’s mother-in-law, and her own grandmother, fulfilling the roles Patricia should have played, but was incapable of.
Most significantly of all, she’d treated Beth like a daughter, and been the perfect maternal figure and mentor for a woman so starved of motherly love. How hard had that been for Rose? To treat the woman who’d taken her own daughter’s place like a trusted, beloved child?
And oh my god, that meant… She looked up at her dad with concern and fear in her eyes. Whatever had made Rose’s life so tragic must also have wounded her father. He’d planned to marry this girl, this Violet, so Rose and her husband were going to become his in-laws. They must have been really close. And then suddenly, all at once, he’d lost his true love, along with the man he’d considered a father figure.
Mike finally noticed how worried she was, and forced a bleak smile. “It was a long time ago darling, and I’ve made my peace with it, although occasionally it does still feel like it all happened yesterday. But Violet didn’t leave us because her dad died, he killed himself because she left.”
“What?” she gasped, as new horror reached out icy fingers to clutch at her heart.
“We were seventeen, and planned to move in with each other as soon as school ended, and start our life together. Then suddenly she fell in love with someone else, or so it seemed, an older guy, a shaman. I still don’t know if he cast a spell on her or if it was all of her own free will, but she sort of broke up with me, and started seeing him. Secretly though, because she didn’t want her mum to know, which was also hard for me, because I didn’t like misleading Rose. Lying to her.”
The love and respect in his voice as he spoke of the priestess touched Rhiannon deeply, and she wondered about the new layers she was uncovering of her father. Did everyone have secret depths and sorrows they never showed to anyone? Could you ever really know another person?
“Apart from the obvious fact that I was still in love with Violet, and wanted to be with her myself, I could never understand her attraction to him,” he continued.
“Maybe it was the worldly older guy thing – most people were in awe of him, especially the girls, and he really knew how to appear charming, to lay it on thick. Although Beth saw right through him.” He trailed off, warmth and love as he thought of his wife pulling him away from her again.
“Dad?”
“Sorry love. Violet tried to explain it to me. She was so disappointed that I couldn’t understand how great he was, and all the reasons he’d swept her off her feet. It seemed that it was very flattering that he had chosen her, because how could he, such a supposedly ‘amazing’ and ‘spiritual’ and ‘enlightened’ guru, love her? She was just an ordinary girl, she said. He was so much better than her, she said. But she was wrong. She was worth ten of him, I can tell you that much.”
Bitterness leached from his words. Even twenty years later, he was still upset by the retelling, still invested in the outcome, and Rhiannon’s heart cried for him.
“It was horrifying yet fascinating to watch him in action. He definitely wooed Violet, showering her with gifts and compliments, telling her she was the only person in the whole world who could understand him, and how special that made her. Yet it was all very self-centred, cynical and insincere – as soon as she fell for him, he began to play on her insecurities, make her feel like she had to do exactly what he wanted in order for him to continue loving her. He was jealous and possessive and cruel, although he hid that from her, obviously.”
Her father’s attention wandered again, and Rhiannon wasn’t sure she wanted to force him to focus back on such painful memories again. But eventually he took a sip of his tea, and started again with his story.
“The worst thing was that he convinced her that she had to leave home in order to prevent her father’s death – that if she stayed in Summer Hill, Louis would die. It was ridiculous, anyone else could see that, but he’d got inside her head and knew exactly what buttons to push. And so she ran away from home, away from Rose and Louis, and didn’t tell them where she was going, or even let them know she was okay.”
Her dad trailed off, and Rhiannon’s heart broke for him, and for Rose too. If she’d ever run away from home, she knew it would have crushed her parents, especially her mum. How did Rose survive that?
“Violet’s dad couldn’t handle the loss. The doctor gave him sedatives, antidepressants, but he started drinking too. He was so sad, and then really angry, which led to him losing his job, and it put a huge strain on his relationship with Rose. Within a month of Violet’s disappearance he’d sunk so low that he couldn’t see a way out, a way to healing, a way back to Rose. So he took some pills and drank a bottle of whisky, and drove off the local bridge.”
Rhiannon gasped, and clutched at the bench, the weight of shock and grief like a punch in the stomach.
“Oh Dad.”
At her heartbroken cry, he turned to her, but his eyes were distant. He was a million miles away from her, an abyss of secrets and pain gaping between them. But he tried to gather his thoughts, to give voice to the feelings he’d locked away for twenty years. “Rose not only became a young widow, but she was also no longer a mother – she never heard from Violet again.”
Rhiannon felt like all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. Shell-shocked didn’t come close to explaining the emotional rollercoaster she was on. It seemed as though the earth had tilted on its axis, and everything she’d ever known to be true no longer was.
“Oh god, poor Rose,” she finally stammered. “And poor you. I’m so sorry Dad.”
She reached out to him, and he offered her a watery, weary smile, but his mind had drifted far away from her.
“How did you, um... I mean, when did you meet Mum?” she asked, and felt a sudden flicker of anger that she had never known this, and a shiver of fear at what she might discover. But she shook them aside, desperate now to know what had happened all those years ago.
“Beth’s parents and my parents were business associates of some kind, so I’d vaguely known her and her sister Jenny since I was a child, although the girls were a bit older than us, so we weren’t especially close. We didn’t go to school together or anything like that,” her dad began.
Rhiannon tried not to recoil from his use of the term “us”, and the knowledge that he was talking about him and Violet when he said it, not him and her mum.
“Beth had left the village when Violet and I were fifteen – she lived in London for a year, studying, then spent a year in France, travelling for a while, then working as a nanny in Paris. That’s why we took you and Brodie to France those times, because your mum loved it so much there, and wanted to share that with us. When she came home for Jenny’s wedding, she wasn’t intending to stay, because she couldn’t bear the thought of being in the same town as her mother, as I’m sure you can understand.”
A shiver raced up Rhiannon’s spine, and she nodded. She couldn’t even begin to imagine what growing up with Patricia as a mother would do to a young girl.
“We started talking at one of her family’s boring business get-togethers – I think Patricia thought it would be useful for the families if Beth and I were married off – and she seemed a bit lonely, so I invited her to one of Rose’s rituals, to get her out of the house really. And Violet sensed her sadness I think, so she welcomed her into our lives and became her friend, letting her come on dates with us, and hang out with us,” he recalled, smiling fondly.
“Beth couldn’t understand why she did that – she told me she would never have let a pretty girl spend so much time with her boyfriend – but Violet grew up with Rose, not Patricia, and so she saw only the good in people. She saw that Beth needed love, and friendship, and opened her heart to her.”
Shock washed over Rhiannon as she tried to reconcile her memories of her mother with what her dad was revealing about her. She’d always thought her mum had been perfect, the kindest and best person she knew, but maybe she hadn’t always been that way. Could that be true?
“Beth was with us when Violet met the other guy. He was teaching a divination course, and the three of us went together – we thought it would be a bit of fun. Beth admitted later that she encouraged Violet’s interest in him, because she was in love with me, and wanted me for herself. She even claimed that she’d cast a spell on me, but I don’t believe that,” he insisted. “She didn’t need to use magic to make me love her.”
Rhiannon’s thoughts flew back to the few rituals she’d gone to with her mum. Rose would never have condoned, let alone encouraged, magic being used for selfish means, to influence someone’s will or gain something for yourself. But could her mum have done something like that on her own?
When she was younger, would she have been so desperate to get away from her own family that she’d tried to ensnare Mike for herself? And turned her back on a friend? Rose’s daughter sounded so sweet and kind, the type of person she’d always believed her mum to be. But if what her dad was telling her was true, and
Beth had done something sneaky, how had she faced Rose all these years? Why had her mum invited the priestess into their lives, into their family?
Or had that been the point? Had she not only wanted Violet’s boyfriend, but her mum as well? Knowing Patricia, she wouldn’t have blamed her mum for wanting to swap parents, but the thought unsettled her. And as much as she wanted to reject the possibility outright that her mum could have done this, something about it just wouldn’t let go.
“But, she wouldn’t do that… Surely not,” she whispered, turning sad eyes on her father.
“I don’t know darling. She did tell me just before she died that she’d spent her whole life trying to make up for the wrong she’d done Violet,” he replied. They stared at each other, unwilling to acknowledge that the Beth they had known could have had such a dark side to her.
“So what happened to Violet?”
“After a couple of months with the shaman guy, she told me she was going to live with him in London, and she hoped that I could be happy for her. She also mentioned something about it saving her dad – the stupid lie that he had convinced her to believe. And then she was gone,” he said sadly.
“I had already come to terms with the fact that I’d lost her, and I’d become closer to Beth over time. But when Violet disappeared, it was your mum who helped me cope. It was just as friends to start with, then slowly my feelings turned romantic, until finally I fell head over heels in love with her. And it was bigger and bolder and deeper and wider than what I’d had with Violet throughout school. So please don’t ever think that your mum was a second choice, or a fallback plan or anything like that. She really was the great love of my life, and she always will be.”
Into the Storm: Into the Storm Trilogy Book One Page 28